One of our budgerigars is a hen; that is, a female budgie. Her name is Angus, after Angus Young, because it amuses me to name budgies after famous Australians, and it’s really hard to tell male and female budgies apart when they’re young. This Spring I was sitting watching TV one evening when I heard a chittering bird noise I’d not heard before, followed by a clunk . I went over…
Have you ever cried in response to a piece of music? I don’t mean from a song; there are plenty of songs with lyrics that can provoke strong emotions. I mean purely from instrumental music. I don’t mean as a result of some mental association either; yes, a particular hymn from a particular funeral might make you sad, but that’s not really the result of the tune. No, I mean have…
About a week ago one of our toilets stopped flushing and wouldn’t unclog via normal means (plunger, auger). Then we realized both toilets were blocked. Then I checked and found other drains weren’t draining properly. The main sewer line was blocked. Obviously this all happened around 6pm, so we had to pay extra to get someone to drive over and augur the main line. When he arrived, he…
Minor spoilers below. TL;DR if you want to skip because of potential spoilers: “Alan Wake 2” is the worst universally acclaimed game I’ve ever played. I liked the first “Alan Wake”. I loved “Control”. I went into “Alan Wake 2” with high expectations and my god, what a let-down. The start of the game quickly had me imagining what the design sessions must have been like. “You know what’s the most…
Back in 2022 I decided I wanted to create a digital Christmas card that I could send out via email. To make the project more interesting, I decided to make an animated card for the first computer I used seriously — a Tandy (Radio Shack) TRS-80. The TRS-80 was where I saw the program that really got me interested in programming. The code was in the Level 1 BASIC manual as an example, titled On A…
Today was the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald . The ship was an iron ore carrier, 222m long. At the time it was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, and the flagship of the Columbia Transportation fleet. One of its nicknames is the Titanic of the Great Lakes. Sailors who have worked on both the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean say that Lake Superior is more deadly than…
I decided to head to the area where they plan to build the hyperscale data center and take some photos to show people what it’s like. The overall biome is wetlands. Here’s a picture of what that looks like: That’s from Morris Thomas road, just west of where they’re planning to have the entrance to the site. Here’s a view along Morris Thomas road, looking west: The…
Someone wants to build a hyperscale data center a few miles from my house, across the border in Hermantown. I say “someone” because the identity of the company is a secret. Back in April, a homeowner discovered that someone was buying land in the area, and asked the council for information . He was told that two members of the council had signed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), and…
If you spend any time on social media, you’ll have noticed a lot of people yelling at each other. It used to be cat pictures, but now it’s just screaming. You’ll also have seen people on one side of a debate repeatedly asking how the other side could possibly do the things they do or believe the things they believe. How can they be so evil? Don’t they know what…
Sometimes it seems like we’re the only people still taking precautions to avoid COVID-19. We’re not; there’s a non-zero number of other people still masking, at least here in Minnesota. It’s clear, though, that for 99% of the population the approach to take is to pretend it’s over. If you’re one of those people, you can stop reading this post. About a year ago…
“The CrowdStrike Disaster” by William McGonagall In the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-four CrowdStrike pushed many content updates out the door But regarding July the Nineteenth, I am sorry to say That an error was made upon that fateful day Across the world were soon spied sorry scenes Of shining blue Windows computer screens With a frowny face made up of ASCII art Saying…
Previously I wrote about leaving Texas due to climate change. I’m not the only one to have noticed the problem: When he lived in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Chang said he took for granted being able to go for jogs outside or go hiking year-round. In Austin, he’s been forced to spend much of the year inside to avoid extreme temperatures and had to buy a treadmill to go running in the…
Recently Bluesky launched a tool called “Ozone”, that they described in their press release as a “collaborative moderation tool”. It’s no such thing. It’s a collaborative filtering tool, and I find it interesting that they keep choosing to obfuscate the difference between the two things. The history of moderation # Moderation was a response to the problem of…
The more I read about Angela Chao’s death the more amazing the story becomes, and not in a good way. The initial story : Angela Chao was attempting a three point turn when her Tesla X reversed down an embankment into a pond and completely submerged. The subsequent details: The Tesla X doesn’t have a gear shift lever. To explicitly shift gears, you have to slide your finger on a strip…
Author AA Milne and his son Christopher Robin both came to resent the Winnie-the-Pooh books . Milne could never get people to take him seriously as an author of fiction for adults, and Christopher Robin got sick of being identified with the child in the stories. Anthony Burgess also came to dislike his most famous book . In an alternate universe, maybe they tried really hard to solve each…
As I get older, I’ve been wanting to look at photographs of the past. Not just my past, but the past in general. There’s something fascinating about photographs of (say) New York in the 1940s, or London during the Swinging ’60s. If I look for photos of places I grew up, though, it’s hard to find any. I think to understand why requires thinking about how the technology of…
In 2015, at the UN Climate Change Conference COP21 in Paris, an international treaty was signed . It committed to holding the increase in global average temperature to “well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels”. It also committed the countries signing it to “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels”. In December 2023, COP28 was held in the United…
Minnesota has been choosing a new state seal and flag. The current seal depicts a white settler ploughing the fields, gun propped against a tree stump, while an Indigenous figure rides on horseback: The seal originally showed the horse galloping into the sunset, and the figure looking back sadly at the land that used to be theirs , but in the 1980s the state government tried to make the image seem…
Back in the 1990s, there was a televangelist called Dr Jack Van Impe. He had a weekly TV show called Jack Van Impe Presents that was quite widely syndicated — because he paid commercial stations to broadcast it late at night when they had nothing better to show. I’m not sure what he was a doctor of ; online sources suggest he got his PhD from a Christian diploma mill called Pacific…
I’m pretty careful with money. I always pay off credit card bills in full when I receive them — but first, I go through the transactions and make sure there aren’t any that look fraudulent. Sometimes this involves consulting my wife to ask if a particular transaction sounds legit. A few months ago I was skimming through credit card transactions when I found one that said Ali Bris…
With the news that both Winnie-the-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner are now in the public domain, I bring you this remix. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clock was stuck at ten to thirteen. Time for a little something thought Winnie-the-Pooh, his chin nuzzled into his fur in an effort to escape the vile wind as he stomped through Victory Woods. A coloured poster, too large for indoor…
Duluth is officially the fifth-largest city in Minnesota. However, three of the top four are Minneapolis, St Paul, and Bloomington, and each of those is around 15 km from the others, in a triangle around the MSP airport. So after the MSP “Metropolitan Statistical Area” (3.7 million people), it’s a really fast drop off to Rochester (121,603), then Duluth. Still, it’s the…
Sometimes everything falls apart, and all you can do is start again. Sometimes you learn that you don’t know who you are, and you have to find out, and it hurts a lot. And then afterward, the person you are realizes that the person you thought you were made some really bad decisions. Sometimes you look ahead and realize that the outlook is dire, and you need to make some drastic adjustments to…
This is the personal web site of mathew, meta@pobox.com . Why “midwist”? It’s an Old English word: midwist, n.: presence; society; participation, cooperation This site is my web presence, and part of my participation in the open web. Also, I’m old and English. And the word sounds like “midwest”, which is where I’m now living.
Contact meta@pobox.com
A GPT-3 story One day, Winnie-the-Pooh was wandering through the Hundred Acre Wood, searching for his next meal. As he ambled along, he couldn’t help but notice the strange, hypnotic quality of the trees. They seemed to whisper secrets to him, beckoning him deeper into the forest. Pooh’s stomach grumbled as he followed the trees, drawn in by their mysterious allure. He knew he should…
In the early 1980s, Tangerine Dream made a major change to their sound. While 1980’s “Tangram” is warm and reassuring throughout, 1981’s “Exit” echoed the nuclear paranoia of the time. In 1982, they continued the theme with “White Eagle”, which opens with a chilly alien soundscape, the beginning of a piece called “Mojave Plan”. Ever since…
At 01:46 -0600 on February 15th, I was woken up by a chorus of beeping noises. Power had gone out, and two UPS systems plus the home alarm system were keen that I should know about it. I was aware of the weather forecast and figured there was a good chance the outage would exceed the 15-minute capacity of the UPS batteries. (Now that’s an understatement.) I wandered downstairs and did a…
I’ve written before about how the business model of Facebook drives the algorithm, and the algorithm drives our current political situation in which lies and conspiracy theories are resurgent. It turns out that the situation is worse than that. Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington have built simulations of social networks , in which each node is an imaginary person with a random set…
In 1971, William Friedkin won a Best Director Oscar (and four more Academy Awards) with his 5th movie, “The French Connection”. Based on a true story, the movie’s amazing car-vs-subway-car chase sequence became famous enough that it has been referenced in video games such as Grand Theft Auto IV. In those pre-computer-graphics days, car chases were filmed by actually performing…
Some things I have learned: I’m not really a big company person. Big company recruiters look for years of experience in very specific areas. Companies looking for generalists tend to be small. I got into a big company by having some very specific experience, but I survived by being in small autonomous departments. There’s a common perception that someone who has been at IBM for 20…
“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.” — General Philip Henry Sheridan Back in May you might have heard that IBM decided to lay off thousands of workers in response to the coronavirus pandemic. There were apparently cuts in June too, and then North America Sales had its turn, and on July 1st I was told that my position was being eliminated at the end of the month.…
What’s happening? # A configurable option is being added to the Git version control software, to GitHub, and to other systems associated with Git. The option will let you configure what you want as the default branch name for the primary source code branch in newly created repositories. The default value for the name of the primary branch hasn’t been decided yet, but popular options…
We’ve now been isolating for well over two months, and distancing for a week or two longer than that. We went out to see a friend a couple of times, to borrow and later return an oximeter, as we were both feeling short of breath from time to time. We both measured as normal, in my case it was just normal mild panic attacks for the obvious reasons. We’ve been out and bought takeout food…
As the weeks go on, I’ve noticed people being increasingly shitty across social media. I totally understand why it’s happening, but in the last week I’ve experienced 5 separate incidents, and that’s more than I am willing to deal with, so I decided it’s time to start disconnecting from some places. I started by deactivating my Facebook account today. I only really…
This is a compilation of posts from 2020. 2020-03-14: Now wash your hands # It turns out that malignant narcissists tend not to make good policy decisions. In late January, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar went to Trump with the news that a new coronavirus was spreading, and that it was serious. Trump didn’t want a program of testing for the virus, though; he thought that increased…
The US Presidential race is basically a big popularity contest. People generally pick a candidate based on personality and how much they like the person, rather than on policy issues. The best way to predict who will win an election is to ask “Which of these people would I rather have a beer with?” Recently I’ve been trying to work out why it’s this way. I’m not…
On December 21st we were all set to head to Minnesota to spend the holidays with family. We got into the car for the trip to the airport, pushed the button to start, and the display turned on all the Christmas lights. This was not good timing, to say the least. Following normal computerized car debugging procedures, I tried turning it off and on again. No improvement. Fortunately the car would…
A familiar tale of tragedy # You’ve probably heard of The Tragedy of the Commons. This is the idea that if a natural resource (the commons) is available to all to use as much as they like, it will inevitably become overused and ruined. This is a common economic argument, which has been cited in contexts ranging from healthcare to the Internet. However, the argument wasn’t popularized…
Since I’ve had several American friends ask me what the deal is with Brexit, here’s my writeup. Please note in advance that percentages from polls aren’t exact, because they’ve varied up and down over the months of drama; and of course, who knows how accurate the polls even are these days? My aim is to describe why the overall problem is going on and on, not to indicate…
When I first moved to Austin, Texas, I expected Texas to be like in “True Stories” — flat, desert, cactus and tumbleweeds. It was a big surprise to find out that central Texas was lush and green and full of trees. It does turn brown during summer, but once the fall rains start everything springs back to life. We recently traveled to Marfa and surrounding towns for some vacation time,…
During the 1970s, the world of modern classical music managed to break in to the mainstream. In the US, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and other avant-garde composers started to be able to fill venues, and they came to have a heavy influence on the electronic music of the late 1980s and early 1990s, from The Orb and Orbital to Colourbox and Aphex Twin. The UK also had a number of classical…
Some time last year I was reading Kleinzeit , a surreal metaphysical novel by Russell Hoban. At some point the character is taking the Underground across London: On a film poster a famous prime minister, shown as a youthful army officer, pistol in hand, glared about him, said in handwriting, I must kill someone, even British workers will do. KILL WOG SHIT, answered the wall. The novel was written…
The holiday weekend detector in the InSinkErator® disposal unit triggered, and as I went to rinse some dishes on Friday I found myself standing in water. I’ve done a little light home plumbing here and there — replaced a shower head, fixed a toilet — but with a long weekend imminent, this was clearly a job for a professional. Clarke Kent Plumbing were able to visit inside an hour —…
Yesterday was our 20th wedding anniversary. On the one hand, it’s incredible. About half of first marriages don’t last 20 years, so the odds aren’t good on average. But on the other hand, we’re not average. We didn’t rush into getting married. In fact, we had to overcome major geographical, legal and financial hurdles to even get to a point where we could consider…
A few months ago we were in a pizza restaurant. Pop music was playing moderately loudly, and at a nearby table a family was tucking in to pizza. I noticed that their child had a slice of pizza, but also a tablet he was using to watch cartoons. I’m no expert on child-rearing, but I think that the combination of parental interaction and pizza should probably be sufficient excitement for most…
Here’s a new game we can all play. The rules are simple: Log out from YouTube and clear your cookies, so you’re viewing the site as some anonymous person it knows nothing about. Go to the front page, and pick a totally innocuous video from its recommendations. Clicking only on recommended videos in the sidebar on the right, see how quickly you can get steered to either white…
In the previous article I talked about some of the history of social media, and identified 14 pervasive problems of today’s online social networks: Addiction to social media Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) and the negative psychological consequences Pervasive annoying advertising Privacy invasion to justify advertising spend and allow microtargeting Spread of extremism through engagement…
The Internet sucks. This is something that pretty much everyone seems to agree on to some extent. Somewhere along the way, things went seriously awry. The result has been a series of news stories of the Internet’s impact on the real world that are hard to distinguish from the dystopian nightmares of science fiction.v Social media has been a big part of many of these nightmares. WhatsApp…
A while back I realized that I spent most of my time listening to music on my desktop speakers while working. The speakers were an old system from Cambridge Soundworks , a local company back when I lived in Cambridge MA. The company had been founded by Henry Kloss, an audio engineer who had also founded KLH and Acoustic Research. Their business model had been midrange to high quality at bargain…